Time Magazine Says SOPA Is 'A Cure Worse Than The Disease'; Would Encourage Censorship

from the mainstream-press dept

It appears that more people in the mainstream press are beginning to recognize just how horrible the SOPA/E-PARASITE bill is when you look at the details. Over at Time Magazine's Techland blog, there's a post by Jerry Brito, saying that it's a "cure" that is "worse than the disease." The post notes that it won't do much to actually stop infringement, beyond at the margin, but the costs of doing so are quite a lot -- especially as the State Department is trying to convince others around the globe not to regulate the internet:

At a moment when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is urging world governments to keep their hands off the Internet, creating a blacklist would send the wrong message. And not just to China or Iran, which already engage in DNS filtering, but to liberal democracies that might want to block information they find naughty. Imagine if the U.K. created a blacklist of American newspapers that its courts found violated celebrities' privacy? Or what if France blocked American sites it believed contained hate speech? We forget, but those countries don't have a First Amendment.

It's good to see the mainstream press recognizing that this isn't just a fight about "foreign rogue sites" as the entertainment industry would have you believe -- but about massive regulation of the internet and free speech.

Re: Re: Re: Doesn't Time Warner own Time Magazine?

Again: don't be a fucking dumbass.

You compared it to Blogger. That is retarded.

You can prove me wrong though: go get a Time Magazine blog and come back with the link. It takes about ninety seconds to do that with Blogger - but I'll be generous and give you 24 hours. If this guy is just some idiot that the editorial board doesn't care about, a genius like you should be able to get on there in no time, right?

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See, this is why you guys tend to misunderstand so many things, because you can't see any grey areas. Everything is black and white in your world, which makes it hard to relate to the real world.

Time gave this guy op-ed space. He submits the op-ed, and generally a publication like this would check it for a few things:

Is the speech legal (ie, does it appear on the surface to be hate speech, racist, or insulting enough to any group that it might raise a lawsuit or legal issues), spell check it, perhaps even re-verify the quotes used in it, etc. Provided the piece passes those bars, most publications are pretty much hands off on op-ed pieces.

It's a grey area. They don't agree with the op-ed (and in fact the editorial board likely disagrees with many op-ed pieces they run), but they see the value in offering both sides of the story, opinions from all sides, as opposed to just piping in their own pre-set views.

So to answer you question, Time wouldn't let him run a pro-nazi op-ed because it wouldn't get past the legal aspects, and likely would not be able to be run without threat of lawsuit or legal action. It is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with the content, rather it is purely a choice of avoiding unwanted legal hassles.

As for "you ppl from the MAFIAA", I suggest that you put your slurs away and move on. I don't work for the MPAA, I don't think that AJ does either. Can you not accept that perhaps reasonable people can have reasonable opinions that don't agree with yours? Can you be so mature as to understand and accept that concept?

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Just because you are a moron that can't see that the law is not only flawed it is useless doesn't mean others don't see it.

Everybody everywhere except on your rainbow coloured world agrees is bad, it will do nothing to stop piracy but will put tremendous burdens on business and as cherry on the top it gives unlimited powers to known corrupt people to go after other business and shut them down or extort better deals.

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"I don't think that AJ does either. "

I certainly do not!

I think perhaps I have made an assumption that has spawned some confusion, my apologies if this is the case.

I assumed that because Time has published around 50 of his articles, they were aligned with his views. This prompted me to point out that a major media company, whom this bill was designed to protect, was concerned that it was more damaging than helpful. This is an assumption any reasonable person would make no? Or do I need to stand in the corner?

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I'm sure the editorial board had no idea what this 'blogger' (read: a law professor who contributes to several magazines including Time on a regular basis) was going to post until it went live on the page...

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Where the hell do you get that from? I don't call Mike "Pirate" anything... sometimes I reference him as "TorrentMike", although he has learned to stop using Torrent freak as a "news" source, so that hasn't come up recently.

I am just point out a fact: This isn't a Time Magazine staff editorial declaring their position, it's an op ed style piece, nothing more and nothing less. It's not a Time Magazine position.

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And I am just pointing out a fact: There really isn't anything of significance or substance in your comments so you might as well go full-out with the hyperbolic verbiage. I mean it's not like there was ever any confusion over the fact that it's an op-ed piece or that it's not a declaration on behalf of the parent company or even the Magazine as a whole.

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I think it is clear:

"Time Magazine Says SOPA Is 'A Cure Worse Than The Disease';"

The title indicates that this is Time Magazine saying this, which technically is true only because it is in their magazine. But it would be like saying "Blogger.com says 'Hitler was a Jew!'" because someone put that in a blog on their site.

It's amazing to watch Mike go. He argues that individual items on a site are not collective (for purposes of bad mouthing SOPA), yet is more than willing to glob everything together and use it to imply the ownership has an opinion, which they have no expressed.

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Wow, are you dense. You almost got the point, and then failed massively.

Mike is the one claiming that individual pages on a website are not the site... and yet as soon as he sees an individual page on Time's website, suddenly it's Time itself making some sort of massive declaration.

I suggest you take your snide remarks, and aim them at Mike - he is the one playing both sides of the same argument, picking whichever side suits him on a given day.

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LOL don't be a dumbass. Time is not an open blogging platform that anyone can sign up for - it is an editorial organization that makes editorial decisions about who it will give a platform to, and who it will allow to express opinions under its banner. Trying to compare it to Blogger is ridiculous. Do you honestly think anyone is going to take you seriously when you attempt such obvious bullshit?

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But you are saying the opposite, if you agree with SOPA then everything in Time magazine is under the responsibilty of Time Warner, and they should be held accountable - except in this case when you wrongly believe it's the sole responsibility of the author and nothing to do with Time Magazine or, indeed, Time Warner.
Can you not see that you are doing exactly what you claim Mike is doing, just from the other side of the fence?

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Yet its Time magazine who's name its running under. FASCINATING.

Not yours, not his own, not Mikes, not mine. Time magazine.

So, op-ed or not, they still published it. There's a hell of a lot of eyeballs going to that website. More than this one, more than yours, and more than mine. I bet more than any MAFIAA website could get, too.

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See AJ's comment (#1 at the top) as to the type of confusion Mike is trying to create. Op-eds are just that, they aren't opinion of the company, they are just different voices that the company allows to have space to say their piece.

Oh and you can stick the stupif MAFIAA thing back in your bag... no need for pointless attacks. It's really takes away from your message.

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Every time I read your idiotic posts I think of some dumb-ass selling Air Supply CD's at a Pearl Jam concert. Nobody is buying your crap here either. The only reason I can think of you ACs posting here is because you get paid to do it. Or you are morons? Which is it?

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You guys are lucky its not my blog, I would be reverse DNS'ing all your asses to see where you are coming from and publishing my results. I bet a lot of the shills are using proxies which is funny because the laws they defend will surely do away with those kind of services. So they are going to put themselves out of work.

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Every time I read your idiotic attempts to put down posters you don't agree with, it makes me think of an 18 year old sent to adult jail for the first time trying to explain to Bubba "no, I don't want to be your bitch", and not realizing that some things are inevitable.

Not everyone agrees with you. Rather than trying to portray them all as shills or idiots, why not take the time to consider the other side of the argument?

Your post makes me think that you are paid by Mike to protect his site. Or are you just a moron?

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I'm sorry man, your comments about our childish behavior or post aren't going to work. Everybody has already lost any respect they might have had for you and people like you. Commenters like you are consistently much worse about doing the things that you accuse us of doing. In fact, the only people paying attention to you are the ones that like to comment anyway. Everybody else just skips past your comments to see who made fun of it. With that said, why do you bother to comment at all unless you are a paid shill/moron?

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You took my post and changed some stuff, can you not come up with anything on your own? Nice to see YOU copy other peoples works. Is that not illegal?

Mike does not pay me, I just get tired of you AC Greedtards always trying to beat him down. So I do it to you.

I am not a moron... well maybe at times. At least I know who I am. I don't sell out my views for a pay cheque to go and abuse people on their sites to try and gain support for something that is not supported by most of the world.

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Not quite the same thing.

Right. It's completely impossible to imagine that a news magazine just might find a law expressly designed to trample the First Amendment as a bad thing. It's not like news organizations depend on a freedom contained in it, right?

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Plenty of "speech" going on at torrent indexing sites and forums, but lets ignore all that, historically laws created for once purpose tend to end being used for other things. So given the broadest definitions in the law maybe it's better to axe it now and save all the agro.

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"historically laws created for once purpose tend to end being used for other things."

Look at broadcasting monopolies and cableco monopolies? Originally, the FCC proclaimed that its government established broadcasting monopolies won't be used to stifle speech because the FCC will ensure a minimal amount of competition. Beyond the fact that this didn't really seem to ensure free speech, over the years the government started wrongfully requiring more and more licenses to communicate over public airwaves and they started wrongfully granting exclusive privileges to private corporations. Now we live in an era where private corporations wrongfully control most broadcasting spectra and the public can not use broadcasting spectra to communicate (beyond a very few designated frequencies with strict limitations, such as wifi) without going through a government established monopolist gatekeeper. Not only does the government wrongfully establish monopoly power over the communication channels (cableco infrastructure and broadcasting spectra), they even wrongfully establish monopoly power over the content distributed over those spectra (via copy protection laws). The government wrongfully establishes monopolies on both the communication channels and the content.

Despite how absurd and one sided our IP laws have gotten (ie: copy protection lengths, ridiculous patents, etc...) and despite the fact that the government wrongfully grants monopoly privileges over almost everything (ie: taxi cab monopolies among many many others) and despite how many of our rights have been wrongfully taken away from us solely to benefit private interests at public expense, the government established mainstream media abuses their monopoly privileges to censor IP and other such criticisms. Mike would likely never get the opportunity to criticize patents or copy protection laws on national television, yet the mainstream press is more than happy to broadcast and sponsor pro-IP propaganda. They know that, in the face of criticism, their position falls apart completely (yet Mike is more than happy to allow commenters on his blog, IP maximists simply can not defend their position).

The end result? Censorship. Even though this may not have been the alleged intent of these wrongful monopoly privileges, the laws are wrongfully being used to censor various positions.

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The fact is, outside of the Internet, censorship is already a reality and bad laws are responsible. and if it weren't for the Internet to keep the mainstream press in check (ie: by pressuring them to discuss certain topics and not to make factual 'mistakes' just to support their bias), the mainstream press would likely be even far more one sided and deceitful than it is today (as I remember it being before the Internet was as popular as it is now).

and the censorship is to the benefit of IP maximists. So IP maximists have no merit when they say, "this isn't about censorship". It is. It's about the government turning the Internet into what it wrongfully turned everything outside the Internet into, a censored platform where everything is sold at monopoly/cartel prices. The government did it to just about everything else, why should I believe that's not what it wants to do to the Internet as well?

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Free speech doesn't mean "right to add music to make it more dramatic". The speech isn't neutered by a lack of music, it is perhaps more that it is exposed as being somewhat less than signficant when stripped of the distractions.

The right to free speech just doesn't include that sort of thing, sorry.

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"The speech isn't neutered by a lack of music"

Being someone that has done over 800 political YT videos, over three accounts, having 5k followers at one point, having most of them removed, and more muted, I will advise you, you are 100% incorrect in your assumption.

By your logic, watching a movie without any soundtrack will have the same impact?

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Not necessarily. Speech need not be an expression of your own opinions at all, particularly not overtly. Distributing statistics or facts is speech, even in the absence of opinion.

Also, it is completely possible to express your own opinion using someone else's creation. You can compile a list of famous quotations that collectively express a unified opinion. You can duplicate what someone else has done in a context that turns it into commentary without you adding a word, etc.

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Why? Techdirt is full of people dismissing this law or that law, this idea or that idea because it won't be 100% perfect all the time. They appear to be unable to see the grey in anything.

There's a gap between even close to 100% perfect and 0.0001% perfect.

But the entertainment industry should be careful at what they are asking for - they might just get it.

News to the media companies - we can live without your media. DRM or no DRM, Paywalls or no Paywalls..

A bad deal, is a bad deal; even if it's the only one. Luckily for us the RIAA and MPAA doesn't regulate food, otherwise they would try to ban people from growing food.

Where does the entertainment industry think their new talent will come from? In the 'perfect' RIAA world, no one could EVER replay ANYTHING without a license. Then so many 'would-be' artists may well never foster an interest in music by playing other people's tunes to learn.

I doubt this guy is even paid by Time Magazine much less speaking for its editorial board. You are such a desperate loser Masnick.

Here's this guy's resume:

Jerry Brito

By day Jerry Brito researches tech policy and teaches law at George Mason University, and by night he develops web and iOS apps. In between he finds time to write for blogs and host a weekly tech and society podcast, Surprisingly Free.

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You doubt? That means you have no clue!!

Sounds like he is a lot more productive to society than you are. Why don't you go find a website where there is plenty of stupid people so you can post there and fit in? Your asinine posts here are just annoying and takes up room on the server.

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Did you read the post right below this one? The Greedtard AC says he is on your side. Maybe you should have read that first before posting. Your parents should put a child lock on Techdirt so we don't have to see your stupidity.

Hey Masnick, in your haste to distort the truth, you forgot to mention that this blogger (and law professor) supports limiting payment processors and ad networks and acknowledges that DNS blocking would prevent people from accessing infringing content. Don't know how you managed to miss that FUDboy.

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Wait a minute....

The author AGREES with the shill's positions, yet still wrote an article claiming that the 'cure is worse than the disease'.

I'm glad that one of the shills was kind enough to point this out (thinking it somehow discredits the point of the article, while actually enforcing it and making it stronger.... shill reading comprehension fail)